Error reporting

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi,

address@hidden (Jeff Kingston) writes:

>> I had searched the User Guide for @ContentsPlace as
>> this was mentioned in the error message but to no avail
>
> This is a perennial problem with systems built by
> definitions on top of a kernel that end users are
> not expected to know about.  When something goes
> wrong, the error message is expressed in the terms
> of the kernel, rather than the end-user abstractions.

Perhaps that's an easy and half-baked answer, but here we go:
exceptions.

Exceptions may be raised by any software layer between the "kernel" and
the GUI/batch formatter, and they may be caught by the software layer
that is the closest to the user.  For instance, the GUI or batch
formatter may be able to say: "An error occurred while rendering the
section entitled `Foo': @ContentsPlace bla bla...", where "rendering the
section entitled `Foo'" could be any high-level, user-understandable
operation.  That may not be perfect, but that's an improvement: the user
at least knows what part of their document is causing the problem.

And exceptions play nicely with side-effect-free programming languages.

Thanks,
Ludovic.